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WARTIME JAIL
★ ★ ★
Asheville’s Prisons
During the war, many large buildings such as
schools, warehouses, and churches became tempo-rary
prisons in Southern cities. After Asheville’s
jail on Pack Square overflowed with Confederate
draft evaders, deserters, Union prisoners of war,
and runaway slaves, the adjacent school, formerly
Major funding for this project was provided by the North Carolina Department of Transportation, through the Transportation Enhancement Program of the Federal Transportation Efficiency Act for the 21st Century.
240
26
Battery
Porter
Riverside
Cemetery
You Are
Here
Battle of
Asheville
USCT
the Asheville Military Academy, became a prison.
Lt. Alonzo Cooper, 12th New York Cavalry,
was confined here in 1864 with 56 Confederate
deserters and a slave. “The room was so full,” he
wrote, “that it was impossible for all of us to lie
down at once, and we were obliged to take turns
standing up.” Cooper planned an
escape: “It was all arranged that the
large, powerful negro should seize
the Sergeant from behind and hold
him while [we] secured his pistol
and the keys.” The escape failed,
however, and the Confederates gave
the slave 100 lashes. “The shrieks
and groans of this poor fellow,”
Cooper wrote, “was enough to send
a chill of horror through the most
hardened. He begged for mercy in
the most piteous terms, and as the
cruel strap laid open the quivering
flesh, and the blood trickled down
his body, I shouted … that the poor
fellow was not to blame, half so
much as the
white men. …
[B]y holding my
hands to my ears
[I] tried to shut
out the sound of
his pitiful cries
for mercy. While
reason remains
to me I can
never forget the
scenes of that
terrible night.”
Confederates imprisoned Hendersonville
newspaper editor Alexander Jones, a Unionist, in
Asheville. He was conscripted into the Virginia
infantry but deserted to Cincinnati. After the war,
Lt. Col. James A. Keith, who led the infamous
Shelton Laurel Massacre of Unionist civilians in
Madison County in 1863, was jailed in Asheville
for two years awaiting trial. Fearing “Judge
Lynch” (hanging by a mob), he escaped on the
night of February 21, 1869, and never returned.
Asheville Military Academy became Asheville’s first public school in 1888 and was renamed
William Randolph Elementary School in 1932. – Courtesy Asheville City Schools.
Alonzo Cooper, from his memoir
In and Out of Rebel Prisons (1888)

WARTIME JAIL
★ ★ ★
Asheville’s Prisons
During the war, many large buildings such as
schools, warehouses, and churches became tempo-rary
prisons in Southern cities. After Asheville’s
jail on Pack Square overflowed with Confederate
draft evaders, deserters,

WARTIME JAIL
★ ★ ★
Asheville’s Prisons
During the war, many large buildings such as
schools, warehouses, and churches became tempo-rary
prisons in Southern cities. After Asheville’s
jail on Pack Square overflowed with Confederate
draft evaders, deserters, Union prisoners of war,
and runaway slaves, the adjacent school, formerly
Major funding for this project was provided by the North Carolina Department of Transportation, through the Transportation Enhancement Program of the Federal Transportation Efficiency Act for the 21st Century.
240
26
Battery
Porter
Riverside
Cemetery
You Are
Here
Battle of
Asheville
USCT
the Asheville Military Academy, became a prison.
Lt. Alonzo Cooper, 12th New York Cavalry,
was confined here in 1864 with 56 Confederate
deserters and a slave. “The room was so full,” he
wrote, “that it was impossible for all of us to lie
down at once, and we were obliged to take turns
standing up.” Cooper planned an
escape: “It was all arranged that the
large, powerful negro should seize
the Sergeant from behind and hold
him while [we] secured his pistol
and the keys.” The escape failed,
however, and the Confederates gave
the slave 100 lashes. “The shrieks
and groans of this poor fellow,”
Cooper wrote, “was enough to send
a chill of horror through the most
hardened. He begged for mercy in
the most piteous terms, and as the
cruel strap laid open the quivering
flesh, and the blood trickled down
his body, I shouted … that the poor
fellow was not to blame, half so
much as the
white men. …
[B]y holding my
hands to my ears
[I] tried to shut
out the sound of
his pitiful cries
for mercy. While
reason remains
to me I can
never forget the
scenes of that
terrible night.”
Confederates imprisoned Hendersonville
newspaper editor Alexander Jones, a Unionist, in
Asheville. He was conscripted into the Virginia
infantry but deserted to Cincinnati. After the war,
Lt. Col. James A. Keith, who led the infamous
Shelton Laurel Massacre of Unionist civilians in
Madison County in 1863, was jailed in Asheville
for two years awaiting trial. Fearing “Judge
Lynch” (hanging by a mob), he escaped on the
night of February 21, 1869, and never returned.
Asheville Military Academy became Asheville’s first public school in 1888 and was renamed
William Randolph Elementary School in 1932. – Courtesy Asheville City Schools.
Alonzo Cooper, from his memoir
In and Out of Rebel Prisons (1888)